Plone Blows Away Commercial and Open-Source Competition in CMS Watch Review
Jun 16th, 2007 by Jon Stahl
CMS Watch’s Tony Byrne recently published his annual “kudos and shortcomings” report on 40 major web content management systems. It’s a summary of a much more in-depth pay-to-read report.
Byrne evaluted CMS in 30 different categories — user-generated content, usability, overall value, etc. In each category, he identified one leader, several “honorable mentions” and several laggards.
Scott Paley of Abstract Edge took the time to add up Bryne’s evaluations into a simple scorecard, and found that Plone handily topped the list, beating out both commercial and open-source competitors as CMS Watch’s most lauded CMS.
| Platform | Kudos | HM | Lagging | Score |
| Plone | 2 | 6 | 4 | 2 |
| Clickability | 1 | 3 | 3 | -1 |
| CrownPeak | 1 | 6 | 5 | -2 |
| Day | 2 | 4 | 5 | -2 |
| FatWire | 2 | 1 | 4 | -3 |
| Hot Banana | 0 | 4 | 4 | -4 |
| Mediasurface | 1 | 2 | 4 | -4 |
| EPiServer | 0 | 1 | 3 | -5 |
| Hannon Hill | 1 | 1 | 4 | -5 |
| Oracle/Stellent | 1 | 3 | 5 | -5 |
| RedDot | 1 | 3 | 5 | -5 |
| Tridion | 3 | 1 | 6 | -5 |
| e-Spirit | 1 | 0 | 4 | -6 |
| Ektron | 1 | 1 | 5 | -7 |
| Escenic | 0 | 1 | 4 | -7 |
| Midgard | 0 | 1 | 4 | -7 |
| Serena | 1 | 1 | 5 | -7 |
| CoreMedia | 0 | 2 | 5 | -8 |
| Ingeniux | 0 | 2 | 5 | -8 |
| Interwoven | 1 | 4 | 7 | -8 |
| PaperThin | 0 | 2 | 5 | -8 |
| Percussion | 1 | 2 | 6 | -8 |
| Refresh Software | 0 | 2 | 5 | -8 |
| eZ Publish | 0 | 1 | 5 | -9 |
| GOSS | 0 | 1 | 5 | -9 |
| Immediacy | 0 | 1 | 5 | -9 |
| TYPO3 | 0 | 3 | 6 | -9 |
| eZ Systems | 0 | 0 | 5 | -10 |
| TerminalFour | 0 | 0 | 5 | -10 |
| WebSideStory | 1 | 0 | 6 | -10 |
| Drupal | 2 | 2 | 9 | -12 |
| Enonic | 0 | 0 | 6 | -12 |
| IBM | 2 | 2 | 9 | -12 |
| Documentum | 0 | 3 | 8 | -13 |
| Joomla! | 1 | 1 | 8 | -13 |
| Sitecore | 2 | 3 | 10 | -13 |
| Vignette | 0 | 1 | 7 | -13 |
| OpenCMS | 0 | 0 | 7 | -14 |
| Microsoft | 0 | 5 | 10 | -15 |
| Alfresco | 1 | 2 | 10 | -16 |
What do I make of all this numerosity? A couple of things come to mind:
- First, it’s obvious that there’s no such thing as “the best CMS”, only tools that are well-suited to particular situations. That said, it’s nice to have folks like Tony providing high-level summaries that cover the broad landscape.
- The Plone community can be justly proud of Plone’s strong scores across the board. I think it signifies the overall high quality of Plone, and its relevance to a wide range of uses. I can’t wait to see how Plone 3 stacks up next year!
- Plone is the only open-source solution near the top of the scorecard. The next 14 top-scoring systems are commercial products. Other open-source products didn’t do so well. Midgard, and TYPO3 were in the middle of the pack. Drupal, Joomla! and Alfresco were down near the bottom (alongside heavyweight commercial offerings from Microsoft, IBM and Vignette!).
- I’d like to know more about the criteria Byrne used for evaluating, but
I suppose I’d need to buy the full report to find out.
These numbers are not correct… Please revise
sweet.
Can you please check your scorecard here, or at least explain how you adding these up? Looking at the same information, I get different results. Specifically, the number of laggings you have for Alfresco are erroneous, and I think the conclusion that we are the bottom misplaced.
Also, I don’t agree (nor do I think that CMSWatch would agree) that things should be added up in this manner. I encourage everyone reading this report to actually buy the CMSWatch report and read the evaluation reports. Alfresco is very positively evaluated in this report. But more importantly than that, CMSWatch provides very detailed vendor analysis simply because different CMSes are designed to support different needs.
The real facts are in the report. It is a solid and worthwhile investment for anyone looking to secure a CMS platform for their next initiative.
Kevin
For the record, all “ranking” systems for software like this are totally lame. And this faux scientific extrapolation from our analysis is particularly inaccurate.
Tony-
But in fairness, I don’t think Scott pretended this is “science” — it’s simply a summary of the information you published. Now, obviously, it doesn’t capture the richness and nuance of your full report, because, you haven’t made that publicly available.
I agree.
@ Kevin-
I didn’t do the summary - please refer back to Scott Paley’s summary for the source.
Jon if you agree why do you publish this without any remark?
Looking at the heading you seem to agree with Scott’s findings.
The real story here is how much the whole market sucks.
@Jason - heh. All software sucks. That is its nature. Software will always suck. Some of it will sometimes suck slightly less than other software.
Hey, you don’t have to tell me that, I’m the guy who wrote this
I guess I should just be relieved that it’s been 5 years and Microsoft didn’t end up 0wnz0ring the market with their CMS after all. But other than that you could take my post and reprint it today and it’d still be accurate. How sad is that?
Oh, and I know you’ll appreciate this other snippet from my 2002 post:
Yes, I said that. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Not a shining moment in my history as a tech pundit
Jason-
Heh. Death of Zope predicted. Film at 11.
Interesting comments. I’ve a question. Our company is looking at purchasing RedDot CMS and came across this review of RedDot CMS. http://reddot-cms.blogspot.com. Is it really as bad as this guy says?
yes, RedDot is as bad as this guy states….it is awful, simply awful.